Tuesday, July 24, 2012

Our Resident Housewife

“She” is a fairly common word at ESSENCE magazine. So is “Her.”
Spend one day in our boardroom, and I guarantee that you will hear at least one
editor talk about this elusive female figure: what She wants, how She feels,
what problems are plaguing Her.

Ok, so when I put it like that, it sounds like we have an
in-house, whiny housewife. But She isn’t. Everything that the editors do at
ESSENCE, they do for Her. She is our reader.

I’m not going to lie, when I first got to ESSENCE, I thought
it was a little odd to speak as if our audience was one single woman. Weren’t
we a national business with millions of readers? How could we condense our
aforementioned millions of readers into one person?

(Ha. Silly Taylor. You have so much to learn about the
magazine industry.)

One of the main things that ESSENCE prides itself on is its
ability to connect with its readers. As an African-American publication, we
have a very specific niche that we write for. For that reason, I’ve found,
readers feel a deep sense of connection with the brand.

Case in point: On one of my first days of work, I was
opening reader mail. Most were story pitches, but I stumbled across one letter
that almost brought me to tears (which is really saying something. I mean, I
barely cried at The Notebook. I’m
basically heartless). A woman was writing to share her struggle with
self-acceptance. She said that she had always thought that she was ugly, and
she listed everything about herself that she didn’t like. She went on to say
that her 85-year-old mother now was having those same inner struggles. She
asked that ESSENCE help she and her mother feel beautiful.

It was almost as if she was writing to a friend. On the day
that she sat down and typed that letter, she wasn’t writing to a national
publication. Shoot, the letter wasn’t even written to one editor in particular.
The envelope was addressed to ESSENCE, as if the magazine was a trusted
girlfriend.

It was in that moment that I understood what distinguished a
good publication from a great one. I guess, as a magazine aficionado, I had
always understood it, but I could never really put my finger on it. And that
differentiation is a magazine’s ability to connect with its readers.

Sure, you can write the most captivating, entertaining
pieces in the world. You can have the hottest starlet on the cover of a
magazine. But what does any of that matter if you’re missing that personal
aspect? That message that sticks with your readers long after they’ve finished
reading the latest issue?

So yeah, hearing my editors talk about “She” and “Her” took
some getting used to (and a conscious grammatical effort on my part), but in
the end, I’ve concluded that it really isn’t that weird. I mean, when She is
coming to us with Her most personal problems, it’s only fair that we
reciprocate that friendship, right?